Crowding in Rockingham County jail prompts discussion over alternatives

Sunday

Dec 30, 2012 at 3:15 AMDec 30, 2012 at 12:34 PM

By Jim Haddadinjhaddadin@fosters.com

BRENTWOOD — After being criticized by his Democratic opponent during the 2012 election, Rockingham County Attorney Jim Reams dismissed the notion this week that he's reluctant to offer criminals alternatives to jail time that could help relieve crowding in the county House of Corrections.

Portsmouth attorney Joe Plaia waged an unsuccessful campaign to unseat Reams during the November election. During his candidacy, Plaia called attention to what he perceives as low participation in the county's new drug court program, as well as its Adult Diversion Program.

The issue was raised as lawmakers in Rockingham County were also seeking options to relieve crowding at the Brentwood jail, which is approaching capacity.

Plaia, a former State Police prosecutor and public defender, said he researched programs around New Hampshire and questioned why more defendants aren't granted alternatives to jail confinement in Rockingham County — either while they await trial or when they're sentenced.

“The common theme it always came back to was, really, it's the Rockingham County attorney's office — the fact that they don't refer people to drug court at the rate that they should,” Plaia said during a recent interview, “and that they don't refer anybody to our drug diversion programs.”

Former Strafford County Attorney Lincoln Soldati, who left the office in 2000, said prosecutors in Rockingham County appear to have a “philosophical abhorrence” of alternative sentencing programs.

“It comes up all the time,” said Soldati, who has been practicing law as a private attorney in Portsmouth for about 10 years.

One recent example he cited was a young woman with a substance abuse problem he defended in Rockingham County. Soldati said the woman was arrested following a drug overdose. She had no prior criminal record, he said, and was enrolled in a drug rehabilitation program by the time her case was heard.

The judge presiding over the case urged the county attorney's office to consider sending her case to the drug court program, but that wasn't viewed as an “appropriate” option by the prosecutor, Soldati said.

“I've tried numerous times on cases that should have been diversion — [cases that] in another county, either Merrimack or Strafford, would have easily been cases that were appropriate for diversion,” he said, “but Jim Reams has a rather draconian view of criminal justice.”

In an interview Thursday, Reams flatly denied that charge. He said Rockingham County legislators have shied away from funding alternative programs, and pointed out unique challenges in the region — such as an inmate population comprised of many people who reside in Massachusetts and Maine.

Convincing inmates to kick their drug habits can also be challenging, he said.

“Dealing with drug addiction is difficult and hard, and many of the people that we recommend don't want to put in that hard work,” he said, “so they take their chances with the system, hoping that they won't have to deal with that issue. In a sense, it's their option, and they choose not to.”

A conversation about how to lower the jail population in Rockingham County has been brewing for months.

Built in 1981, the facility originally housed 86 beds, and another two padded cells. Beds were then added, cell block by cell block, over the course of three decades, and an addition was built in 1991.

Today, bunk beds have been added to former showers and seating areas, and every available space is double-bunked, providing 387 beds — deemed the maximum capacity for the building. Women have long been housed in neighboring county jails.

On an average day, the jail houses roughly 313 male inmates. Roughly one third have been sentenced, and the remainder are still waiting for a trial.

Between 2011 and 2012, pretrial inmates waited an average of 87 days in jail before their cases were heard in court, according to information provided by Rockingham County Department of Corrections Superintendent Stephen Church.

While the jail has never reached capacity, the population has risen in the range of 340 inmates at times in the past, he said, stretching the abilities of jail personnel.

“You always want a little bit of breathing room in a correctional facility...” Church said in an interview this month. “You need room to move prisoners around because of protective custody issues, security concerns, rivalries, gang issues. We need room to move people in and out of different classifications.”

The county does offer a range of alternative sentencing and diversion programs that could hypothetically help ease the crowding, Church said. Among them is a fledgling drug court program at the superior court in Brentwood, which is approaching the end of its second year in existence.

The county also has a new mental health court program conducted in Portsmouth and an 11-year-old Adult Diversion Program.

The SCRIP program, operated by the sheriff's department, also offers a limited number of people who can't make bail an opportunity to be released under supervision while awaiting trial.

And for inmates seeking drug counseling, the county Department of Corrections coordinates “Solutions, Transitions and Recovery” — an in-house drug abuse treatment program. Currently, 28 people are enrolled.

Still, those efforts have failed to garner nearly as many participants as programs elsewhere in the state.

In Strafford County — which has a population less than half the size of Rockingham County — there are now, at any given time, approximately 475 criminal defendants engaged in drug courts, mental health courts, diversion programs or other forms of pretrial or post-trial supervision that allow them to stay out of jail, according to information provided by county officials.

“If it weren't for our programs, we wouldn't be able to house the people that we do,” Strafford County Criminal Justice Programming Coordinator Carrie Lover said this month.

Five Rockingham County House members have formed a committee to study measures to alleviate the jail overcrowding problem. Rep. Laura Pantelakos, of Portsmouth, said the group is looking for options to keep non-violent offenders out of jail.

Rockingham County taxpayers pay about $98.50 per day to house inmates in the county jail, plus medical expenses. That adds up to about $36,000 per year per inmate.

“It's a very costly issue,” Pantelakos said. “It really frustrates me when I hear that somebody's in jail for nine months or a year in Rockingham when he should be in the state's prison.”

Rockingham County Commissioner-Elect Kevin Coyle said he's planning to push for the county to adopt an expanded pretrial supervision program after he takes office in the new year.

“I think that pretrial supervision is probably the best thing that we could do to alleviate the jail overcrowding,” said Coyle, a Derry Republican and former Londonderry Police Department prosecutor.

Coyle said he believes existing options in Rockingham County, like the Adult Diversion Program, appear to be “very little used.”

“I think there are a number of reasons for that, but I think the primary reason is that the county attorney's office ... just doesn't believe in diversion, and just doesn't use the program,” Coyle said.

For more than a decade, Rockingham County has offered an alternative sentencing option for first-time, non-violent offenders known as the Adult Diversion Program.

Eligibility is open to any case at the district court or superior court level. Participants are most often facing drug-related charges, though eligibility is open for a range of offenses.

Participants in Rockingham County are usually between 17 and 23. All are drug tested and receive drug counseling, as needed. They also pay restitution to victims, pay a program fee and perform community service.

To participate in the diversion program, a plea of not guilty is entered on behalf of the defendant, who agrees to participate in diversion for between six months and one year. Successful participants avoid a criminal conviction.

Since 2001, the program has received 955 referrals for participation. Dawn Barnes, a staffer in the Rockingham County Human Services Department who directs the program, said nearly all defendants are accepted, and about 83 percent of those referred to diversion have successfully completed the program.

Asked to gauge the current level of participation, Barnes said, “There's been times that I've had more cases than this ... I've never turned anyone away, ever. If anything, I'd love to see more referrals.”

As of November, there were 48 people enrolled in the program, according to records provided to Foster's Daily Democrat by the county Human Services Department.

Many defendants were referred to the program by area police departments. The Seabrook police prosecutor alone has referred 19 defendants to the program this year.

Only two were referred by the county attorney's office.

Following in the footsteps of early adopters in Stafford and Grafton counties, officials in several parts of the state are launching new programs aimed at helping defendants with substance abuse problems.

Referred to as drug courts, the programs generally offer non-violent offenders with a history of drug addiction an opportunity to participate in an intense, court-supervised treatment program for between 12 months and 18 months in lieu of a jail sentence.

“I feel like we're reaching a tipping point where people are recognizing the value of it,” said Superior Court Chief Justice Tina Nadeau, who helped launch the Rockingham County drug court, and has championed the effort elsewhere in the state.

In Grafton County, where the drug court is five years old, the county attorney assesses some 500 cases a year for drug court eligibility.

The county budget funds the program at a level of about $250,000 per year, most of which goes to treatment programs, a clinical evaluator and drug testing. The cost per person in the drug court program is about $12,000 per year.

The Strafford County Drug Court has been operating since 2004. It accepts people facing either misdemeanor or felony charges. The county picked up the tab for the program five years ago after a federal grant expired, and it now provides services for an average of 65 people at any given time.

Since the county no longer depends on federal funding, it has given prosecutors flexibility to enroll defendants with more checkered histories — including some with violent incidents in their pasts, something not allowed under the federal model.

“We have many people with violent histories in there because we realize the biggest bang for your buck is the high-risk, high-need people,” Lover said.

After witnessing the successes of the drug program in Strafford County, Nadeau was encouraged to launch a similar effort to combat drug-fueled crime in Rockingham County.

“I started to see the same profile over and over,” she said, recalling a slew of defendants who were charged with stealing copper pipe for drug money. “I thought, 'Okay, this is why Dover started their drug court.'”

Rockingham County's drug court was launched in 2011, funded entirely by a three-year, $350,000 federal grant, which pays only for treatment costs. The rest of the program is operated on a volunteer basis by the county attorney, the probation department, the court and public defenders.

Participants attend intensive outpatient group sessions three times a week, as well as individual therapy sessions once a week.

When the program was launched, organizers anticipated between 10-15 people would immediately be eligible for the program.

But during its first year in operation, the drug court struggled to draw participants, according to an assessment written by a drug court team member in December 2011.

“The team has attempted to reach out to community partners in an effort to increase our client base, but we believe it will take more time for the program to become an integral part of the criminal justice process in the county,” reads the assessment, which was provided to Foster's Daily Democrat by the Grants Management Unit of the New Hampshire Department of Justice.

In the past two years, only about 25 people have been referred to the drug court, and no participants have finished the program. Fifteen are still participating now, and the program has space for another five or 10 participants, according to Nadeau.

In a Nov. 30 memo to members of the Rockingham County House Delegation, Reams wrote that it “remains to be seen” whether the drug court is “worth the current substantial investment of prosecutor time and effort that I have made to this project.”

Although she acknowledged participation has been lower than she had hoped for, Nadeau said she believes the program is still functioning effectively. One early sign of success is the low level of new offenses being committed by drug court participants, she said.

“I think we all hoped that we'd get more people,” Nadeau said, “but there's some realities at play that we're really learning about now.”

One such reality is the fact that about 20 percent of inmates in the jail are from out of state, automatically disqualifying them. The other challenge is convincing defendants they should spend more than one year in an intensive treatment program.

“I think that I have not seen reluctance on the county attorney's part, based upon the cases that come before the team,” she said.

Reams points out that the Rockingham Drug Court is using federal standards that are inflexible about eligibility. About 30 percent of the inmates in Rockingham County's jail have a violent criminal history that disqualifies them, he said.

“I think, you know, we're continuing to look for them,” he said. “You have to remember that it is not designed for drug users. It's designed for addicts. It's designed for the worst of the worst, so to speak — the people who really have major drug problems.”

Reams said his support for extending the drug court with county funding will depend on an assessment of how successful and “cost efficient” it's been. He said the drug court concept is one most prosecutors generally accept as positive.

“It's a new process, so everybody, as we get closer to the end, will step back and analyze where we are and where we think we should go,” he said. “Absent that, it'd be hard for us to convince funders, whether it's grant funders or the county delegation, to put money into it.”

Discussing the Adult Diversion Program, Reams said it doesn't have a significant impact on the population at the county jail.

“It's primarily a district court program, not a superior court program,” he said. “We've tried to put some people in it, and put a couple in it, but it's not a program that's really directed toward the superior court.”

Reams said it would be “uninformed and incorrect” to suggest that the county attorney's office doesn't support diversion programs, or the drug court. He attributed the jail crowding problems to an increase in the population of Rockingham County and a reduction in resources in the court system.

“We're willing to look at everything,” Reams said. “I just don't think there's any magic pill that anybody's going to take that's going to fix that problem. Processing cases through the system faster is more likely to have an impact on some of that stuff as coming up with new programs.”

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